Data Analytics Demystified: Blogging

This is the second post in our series on smart data. To see the first post, click here.

This post is a bit meta—this blog post is going to talk about how to use data analytics to publish better blog posts! And it’s an easy example to start with because you don’t need to run any real statistical tests to make useful conclusions. You only need to mentally compare information.

To do this, you’d need some analytics service enabled in your blog. Google analytics is a good example.

With Google Analytics enabled, you can view metrics related to the time and date that your site’s content was accessed. Let’s say that, through a cursory glance at a month’s worth of records, you notice that each time you publish something new on a Sunday night, you get fewer visitors than you do when you post on a Thursday night.

If you’re only going to post once a week, you should therefore post on Thursdays. Right?

And Google Analytics will also tell you which articles are most popular; maybe your posts on data analytics are (not surprisingly) way more popular than your posts on everything else. You can use this information to plan the topics you will write about in the future, to optimize your readership!

Perhaps, once you have built up an audience that now religiously checks your blog every Thursday night to read your entertaining and educational posts about data analytics, you can ever so subtly slip in other things you might want them to know about! And they will probably engage with those new things more predictably than if you posted them randomly, on their own.

If you remember from the last post, we discussed how a consumer's behavior can affect a manager's behavior, which can then, in turn, affect a consumer's behavior. This is an example of such an interaction! See? I didn't make that up!

The next post in this series will explain how we can use smart data in more complicated applications too! Check in often to get more thrilling information about how data can inform everything we do. And check in to read about other interesting things too!